(no subject)

[telophase]

Interlingua, a created language. If you know a Romance language, you can probably read it. (I don't know one, but I've had enough exposure to French and Italian in class and enough knowledge of Latin roots that I can read most of it. Not quickly, but enough to get the gist.)

Comments

[trobadora]

Oh, cool. I can actually read that pretty well!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I was most intrigued by the way it apparently helps people learn Romance languages - there's a mention in the English Wikipedia version of the article that says a class of Interlingua learners were able to translate a Spanish text when a class of Spanish learners couldn't. I can see why - you're learning word roots and not the grammars of the individual languages with Interlingua, and you can usually glean the meaning from context if you know the words. (It's how I read Italian with a dictionary. XD)

[trobadora]

That's fascinating! I was just thinking that this was easy to understand, but I wouldn't have the first clue how to actually put a sentence together myself - that's exactly what you say about the word roots.

And you know what? I've forgotten what French and Spanish I once knew, but the phonetic systems clearly have embedded themselves in my brain - I "hear" some of the words in Spanish, others in French. (And the rest in Latin as pronounced by a German. *g*)